The Neon Demon

It's still October, still Hallowe'en month, and today is "Take Out the Trash" Day. But, instead of a trash-bag, this garbage has a highly stylish wrapping. It's still garbage, though.

The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016) I remember this hitting theaters and purposefully not seeing it for a couple reasons—1) it was directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, whose Drive I found half-baked and a bit pretentious (looked nice, though...) and 2) because it was getting a reputation for being "sick"—never a good word-of-mouth for me. And its star was 16 year old Elle Fanning, whose acting I've found competent but not compelling. The fledgling Amazon Studios bought it for distribution and that signaled to me that if I missed it in theaters, it would show up—and quickly—in their streaming service.

 

It did. But I never watched it. That's on me, not the film.

I occasionally do podcasts where the host, guests, and I talk about movies—they being articulate, me being hesitant, umming and uhhhing and nattering on until I forget the point of what I was saying (Thank God for editing!) and The Lambcast had me scheduled for one of their Movie of the Month podcasts, where people submit films they want to talk about and it gets voted on by folks with the Large Association of Movie Blogs, the winner getting its time in the spotlight. Last March, The Neon Demon was voted to be the MOTM and I dutifully watched it, so that I might give my thoughts on it.

Those thoughts were pretty damn dark. "I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns" I recall saying. Hyperbolic that may be, but it was only a matter of degree. For Refn's film, under the guise of making a point of exploitation, only reflects that exploitation while not saying anything new, unique, or even realistic about its subject. "The Demon" that the movie tangentially and unsuccessfully tries to make some sort of analogous reference to (the title's use of "neon" suggests the city) is basically the film itself, and it's just as clumsy, despite its scrupulous framing and art direction. It's a gilt-wrapped presentation that opens to find...absolutely nothing, lovely to look at (on occasion), but hollow not only to its core, but everywhere.

Stylish—but to a fault—The Neon Demon follows the path of 16 year old Jesse (Fanning) who's come to Los Angeles following the death of her parents and the film opens with a blood-soaked static photo-shoot she's having with a photographer she's met on the internet. As it's the first thing we see, we wouldn't be surprised that Jesse is already dead, as she lies lifeless on a couch, blood dripping down her arm onto the floor. That's all that's required of her—no personality, no expression—she's just an image, a concept, a commodity to sell something (god knows what...). After, Jesse is struggling to wipe the red Karo syrup off her body and is helped by her makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who doubles as a mortuary cosmetician (natch!).

♪I love L.A.♫

Through Ruby, she gets a room at a fleabag hotel (run by a sleazy Keanu Reeves in one of his "please, don't speak" roles) and an interview at a modeling agency. She falsely signs a parental consent form and is told she should answer to 19...as 18 is a little..."you know." She then starts to make the rounds of cattle-calls, where she runs into two models in particular, Gigi (Bella Heathcote)—who's all about cosmetic surgery—and Sarah (Abbey Lee)—who's all about sleeping around to get jobs. They're catty and jealous and more than a little aggressive in their judging Jesse (I mean why not, the job's all about judging), who's a neophyte, probably a virgin, and has nothing going for her except her looks...like them.

But, Gigi and Sarah are more so. After one of those casting sessions that Jesse gets but Sarah is passed over for, Jesse cuts her hand in the bathroom and is shocked when Sarah tries to suck her blood. See where we're going with this?

The toxic male gaze; the female ambivalence to it

Yeah, that's where it's going...so I'd find the nearest cut-off (believe me, there'll be plenty of that later in the movie). Refn is portraying a predatory L.A.—something I admit I've always felt deep in my bones whenever I would visit the city—where the young models must contend with the predations and the manipulations of agents, the whims of self-designated artistes, and the jealousies and resultant scorn of their competitors and its products visited upon them. The predators being both male and female, there's plenty of blame to go around.

But, the movie only works as a metaphor and The Neon Demon gets it ass-backwards. Most horror films use the horror as a metaphor for everyday life, but Demon uses real-life to get to the horror. I don't see it as spoiling anything by revealing what eventually happens, but more of a public service. In their covetousness and jealousy, Ruby, Sarah and Gigi kill Jesse in a swimming pool and eat her. That's not a euphemism or a typing error. They eat her. Apparently to consume her youth, which they want. Great metaphor, huh?

Now, we don't see this past Jesse bleeding out at the bottom of the pool, but at the next photo-shoot, during a break, Gigi hoarks up one of Jesse's eyeballs...which Sarah then eats (waste not, want not, apparently). One might "buy" this, but the fact of the matter is Jesse was...what 5'9" and weighs 54 kg (according to some Elle Fanning web-site or other) and it beggars the imagination that the two rail-thin, near-anorexic models who supposedly consumed her don't look like they've had any more caloric intake lately than what one could suck from a celery stick. Argue all you want that they probably did some purging in the meantime, but...c'mon. Ozempic couldn't have solved this one.

I mean, yuck. The Neon Demon doesn't work as body horror, metaphor, or "pieces-of-meat" societal critique and for all the professions of "the cinematography is great" that is true in only some instances throughout the film's length and even then, those images are static, stylized, and sporadic. Most times, Refn is just "getting the shot" that he can. And although I hate to use this Pauline Kael quote (because when—panning Barry Lyndon—she used it she was wrong) but sometimes it's true that a director "isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures."
 

And Refn has a great future filming obtuse perfume commercials.

"The Neon Demon...only at Macy's"

Drive (2011)

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Flash Over Substance"
or
“I used to produce movies in the '80′s. Kind of action films, sexy stuff…one critic called them 'European.'  I thought they were shit”

In 1987, two movies of the same type came out and they could not be any more different, despite their similarities of plot—Martin Scorsese made After Hours and John Landis made Into the Night. Both were movies about semi-clueless day-jobbers who had to negotiate the dark unknown (to them) underbelly of their cities in the wee small hours of the morning and somehow survive to the dawn. What made them different were the sensibilities of the directors and their neighborhoods—Scorsese's took place in brownstone New York and Landis' took place in the high-styled concrete of Los Angeles. 

It's a similar trick here, it just took 36 years to make an L.A. counter-point to Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and that film is Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn in the same cold blue-and-teal gloss of a 1980's era Michael Mann film or the similar cool veneer provided Risky Business' Paul Brickman.*

Like Scorsese's film, we have a restless professional driver (Ryan Gosling), but it's L.A. so he's a stunt-driver for the movies by day, and a for-hire getaway genius at night (demonstrated by two very nicely laid out chase sequences, one at night evading the police and one chase on the open road later in the film). He's also a garage mechanic for mentor Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who has designs on a racetrack career with his young protégé behind the wheel.

The Driver—he is a typical "Man with No Name" with no discernible past and an "iffy" future—is utterly defined by his mechanical abilities under the hood and behind the wheel.  His words are spare,** never betraying the mind that is firing on all cylinders, his eyes taking everything in, without much expression to betray his heart or motivations, much like the visual style and minimal acting employed for Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. But with no name and no voice-over narration to provide motivation, the audience is always just a little behind what is being presented on-screen, which pays off in a couple of nifty ways early on as the director presents him in an environment without giving any clues as to what might be going on. For instance, that first getaway sequence at night is followed by a day shot of Gosling in a policeman's uniform. A moment of disorientation follows (he's a cop?...but...), which is then visually resolved in a way that makes one trust one's own abilities to find the answers (and the director to provide them), if not entirely trust The Driver. That works well over the arc of the story, which, frankly, is not that special, despite the interesting way it is delivered.

For that character development is where Drive and the classic Scorsese film merge and go different paths, to the earlier film's advantage. The Driver becomes involved with his neighbor—she does have a name, Irene, played by Carey Mulligan—who has a husband in prison (Oscar Isaac) and a son she's caring for herself. The Driver takes an interest, helps out, becomes involved in their worlds, then, just as everybody is getting comfortable—quiet, yet comfortable—the husband gets released from prison, and becomes wrapped up in some bad goings-on. Empathizing with Irene, fearing for the boy, he volunteers to be the driver on the Standard One Last Job for Irene's husband, where things do not go smoothly, putting everybody's life in jeopardy and making The Driver a one-man revenge squad to get to the bottom of what happened and keep the family safe.

And that's where Drive left me cold. Taxi Driver was an urban fairy tale, the product of one man's romantic fantasy that didn't fit in with the real world. And Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese's direction spelled out that Travis Bickle's image of himself as a knight aboard a checkerboard steed was just as fanciful—and deluded—as Don Quixote's. Drive takes it all very seriously, assured that the nurturing care-giver and the bloody names-taker can be contained in one self-contained package. Taxi Driver had the smarts and the ironic cynicism to let the world at large buy into Bickle's fantasy and myth, despite him being, in truth, a psychopath. But, Drive's hero, with veins running anti-freeze...and let us say "unique" ways of threatening people...is swathed in eyes-wide romanticism, without the distancing projection of myth...or even humor, ironic or otherwise. His "Man with No Name," being in action more like one of Kurosawa's samurai or Leone's gun-slingers, moves through the landscape, but without the flaws that define character, a cypher, unknowable, unapologetic, unaccountable and ultimately adrift—something more spirit than human.

A note on the violence: as in Taxi Driver, it is surprising, shocking and unmerciful, a result of Refn's stylization—he splashes the color red in the cold colors of his landscape occasionally to attract the eye of the audience and the Driver and the blood of the violence, because it clashes so much in the color scheme of the film, is doubly grisly (just think how lurid the shooting spree in Taxi Driver would be if the colors weren't destaurated in order to secure an "R," rather than an "X," rating), to the point where it elicits uncomfortable laughter, rather than gasps.

The bottom line, then, is that the film becomes out-of-step with itself, a cool silver jacket with patches of red from wearing its heart on its sleeve, unsentimentally sentimental, tears falling amidst acid rain. However cleverly distilled from its cinematic but more cynical predecessors, with its untarnished knight in shining chrome, Drive is a fairy tale for the phony-tough.

* The similarity even extends to the soundtrack, which vibrates to Euro-buzz techno with lyrics that offer on-the-nose commentary to what's happening on-screen.

** One of the funniest lines in the film (to me, anyway) has Shannon's pre-introduction to investor Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks—also in Taxi Driver—and there isn't a trace of comedy in his performance, which is quite impressive) include the phrase "Don't say anything," as if his character wouldn't, anyway.

  Lip service is paid to the Fable of the Scorpion in Drive.

Orson Welles explains it all for you (from Mr. Arkadin).
And just to show that the story has become "a trope," here it is in The Crying Game.